Amor Mundi

Propaganda and Cynicism

By Roger Berkowitz
McKay Coppins created a fake Facebook account and dived head first into the world of Donald Trump’s propaganda machine. What he found surprised him. And yet, it is exactly what Hannah Arendt argued 70 years ago about the nature of modern propaganda. The point of propaganda is not to make people believe it.

On Constitutional Disobedience

Christopher Schmidt
In this essay I consider how reform activists use the United States Constitution as a tool of social movement mobilization. I focus in particular on situations in which activists advance a claim on the meaning of the Constitution that diverges from what the courts—and especially the court at the top of the American judicial hierarchy, the U.S. Supreme Court—say the Constitution means.

The Need to Be Right

By Roger Berkowitz
Jon Baskin in The Point identifies a disturbing tone in liberal culture. He recalls Lionel Trilling’s 1947 admission of his “deep distaste for liberal culture.” While Trilling identified with liberalism, he wrote that too often...

Winning Chess, Winning Politics

By Roger Berkowitz

Garry Kasparov argues that those who oppose President Trump from all sides need to come together to defeat him. He warns that,  “As much as opposing ideologues may hate each other, there is no one they despise more than those who try to make peace between them.” Witnessing the rise of radicalism on all sides, he writes, “Rage...

Power, Arrest, Dispersal

By Patchen Markell
To read this line from The Human Condition in the wake of the demonstrations in Tahrir Square, or in the midst of the Occupations that have radiated from Zuccotti Park across the United States and beyond, might be invigorating: aren’t both of these events expressions of power in Arendt’s sense, instances of the unpredictable human capacity to break out of the daily mire of authoritarianism or of capitalism and, acting in concert, to begin something new?

Reading Arendt in the Era of #MeToo

By Kate Bermingham
More often than I would like, my work on Hannah Arendt and my work as a feminist theorist and activist seem to pull in different directions. I sometimes find myself frustrated not only by Arendt’s relative silence on questions of gender and her occasional sexist remarks (among other things, she once remarked that it was unbecoming for women to occupy positions of authority), but also, like many feminist readers before me...

What We're Reading: Standing On His Own

By Roger Berkowitz
George Packer won the 2010 Hitchens Prize given annually in honor of Christopher Hitchens. In his acceptance speech, Packer explores why it is highly unlikely that another writer like Hitchens might emerge in our time. “Why is a career like that of Christopher Hitchens not only unlikely but almost unimaginable? Put another way: Why is the current atmosphere inhospitable to it?...

Oikophilia

By Roger Berkowitz
Roger Scruton died earlier this month. In obituaries, he was frequently called a conservative philosopher. The Guardian wrote that he “was a philosopher and a controversial public intellectual’ who “dedicated himself to nurturing beauty, “re-enchanting the world” and giving intellectual rigour to conservatism.”

What We're Reading: A Monumental Effort

By Roger Berkowitz

Ulrich Baer writes that three new sculptures by Kehinde Wiley, Wangechi Mutu, and Kara Walker offer a new and important way to engage the debates about what to do with historically meaningful but offensive monuments.